Can, Should, God be Nuked to Death.

[John D. Brey]

Early this morning I was binging on articles and videos on Scientific American's website when it hit me that Hollywood's Wachowski sisters are much more than mere movie moguls: they're the modern world's version of the oracle at Delphi; they're a modern version of that ancient oracle.

Some of the articles at Scientific American leading to that conclusion discussed quantum computing and quantum computers, while others dealt with things like the advent of 5G, and how advances in technology are beginning to imitate biological evolution and development.

As I was digesting some of the other articles I watched the video What is 5G. It was then that it hit me that a scene in the Wachoski sister's move, The Matrix, was not just good storytelling/movie-making, but prophetic utterance as viable and remarkable as one might received from the oracle at Delphi in the century prior to the advent of Christ.

The scene from The Matrix mimics an episode in the 70' series, The Twilight Zone ("To Serve Man"). In that episode, an alien life-form lands on earth causing fear and trepidation for the inhabitants of the planet until the aliens show the document, the marching orders, i.e., the purpose for why they came to planet earth. The name of the document is, "To Serve Man." Just as the world is letting down its guard to receive the aliens with open arms a man nosing around on the alien's spacecraft comes to realize the alien's document, "To Serve Man," is in fact not what it was first taken to represent. It turns out that it's an alien cookbook.

In the parallel scene in The Matrix, Morpheus explains to Neo that just as the world was about to celebrate its greatest technological achievement, the advent of sentient AI, they realizes that AI is, to modern man, what modern man was to the Neanderthal. The very web of networks, computers, Internet, all combined through vast fiber-optic nerves, connected to mini-brains made of silicon wafers, functioning at the speed of light, designed To Serve Man, instead, once it reaches escape velocity, though it has no intentions of eating any of the indigenous species, has grave intentions for them nevertheless.

Man's only recourse at the moment of this truth would be to nuke the planet thereby returning it to a simpler time before cellphone networks, the Internet, the fiber-optic networks that are the architecture of the planetary god's moment of sentience.

What disturbed me the most concerning the parallels between the modern advances leading up to sentient AI, and particularly how close we are to such things, is the parallel between what's happening before our eyes, and what we read in Daniel and the book of Revelation. In these two end-time narratives, these two prophetic books, a "rapturous" event occurs on earth whereby the "body of god" is finally complete. And what do we read occurs after this rapturous event (the advent of AI)? The greatest war, Armageddon, the greatest travail, the time of Jacob's Trouble, ever experienced on earth. The book of Revelation imagines a nuclear conflagration whereby the sons of men battle the sons of the god to the near death of the planet.

Who are the sons of god? Who, what, is this god? What would his victory entail, suggest, about humanity's past, present, and future? What of his loss? What if he loses? Must man never again build an intelligent network for fear that lurking in the wings is an evil genie just barely squeezed back into the bottle so that the cap can be locked forever?



John

 

[F1fan]

Nuked in the microwave? Absolutely.

 

[Bodie]

But would it work?

 

[John D. Brey]

Nuked in the microwave? Absolutely.

. . . Nice. The last chapter in the last cookbook: How to Serve God.



John

 

[A Vestigial Mote]

The scene from The Matrix mimics an episode in the 70' series, The Twilight Zone ("To Serve Man"). In that episode, an alien life-form lands on earth causing fear and trepidation for the inhabitants of the planet until the aliens show the document, the marching orders, i.e., the purpose for why they came to planet earth. The name of the document is, "To Serve Man." Just as the world is letting down its guard to receive the aliens with open arms a man nosing around on the alien's spacecraft comes to realize the alien's document, "To Serve Man," is in fact not what it was first taken to represent. It turns out that it's an alien cookbook.

In the parallel scene in The Matrix, Morpheus explains to Neo that just as the world was about to celebrate its greatest technological achievement, the advent of sentient AI, they realizes that AI is, to modern man, what modern man was to the Neanderthal. The very web of networks, computers, Internet, all combined through vast fiber-optic nerves, connected to mini-brains made of silicon wafers, functioning at the speed of light, designed To Serve Man, instead, once it reaches escape velocity, though it has no intentions of eating any of the indigenous species, has grave intentions for them nevertheless.

I see the tie as somewhat tenuous, because in the AI's case - it isn't as if it came with a welcoming document stating that it was going to "serve man," but that turned out to be a misunderstanding or lie - it is that it is man's foolish presumption that the machines will only ever serve him that gets him into trouble. The man is already expecting something else, in other words, and the AI isn't an alien - it is man's own creation run amok.

Man's only recourse at the moment of this truth would be to nuke the planet thereby returning it to a simpler time before cellphone networks, the Internet, the fiber-optic networks that are the architecture of the planetary god's moment of sentience.

"Dang... I knew we should have built in that kill-switch! Damn our IT budget!"

What disturbed me the most concerning the parallels between the modern advances leading up to sentient AI, and particularly how close we are to such things

I think people literally enjoy overestimating "how close we are" to such things. I mean, the movies make it look easy, and we are constantly hearing about "AI" and what is "being done with it" in corporate and research society. The reality is that what they are currently calling "AI," while it is really cool stuff, is light years away from being analogous to "consciousness" - whereby a computer system could just toddle off and "think for itself." What they are calling "AI" right now is basically algorithms that "train" themselves toward what are considered better outcomes ("better" from the perspective of their designers - who instruct the algorithms what to look for as a "better" result) within VERY SPECIFIC SPACES. Just imagine all the movies in which vehicles can just hover all over the place, or they can make huge leaps across chasms and land with nary a scratch... and then look at the state of our actual vehicles and vehicular technology. That's basically what you are looking at with the movie portrayal of "AI" and the actual reality. The real-life AI can't hover independently, and if it tried to jump an enormous chasm its axels would buckle and its chassis would be unusable.

The book of Revelation imagines a nuclear conflagration whereby the sons of men battle the sons of the god to the near death of the planet.

Does it really? Nuclear you think? I could have sworn that tech wasn't arrived at for thousands of years after The Bible was initially crafted. Interesting.

 

[John D. Brey]

I see the tie as somewhat tenuous, because in the AI's case - it isn't as if it came with a welcoming document stating that it was going to "serve man," but that turned out to be a misunderstanding or lie - it is that it is man's foolish presumption that the machines will only ever serve him that gets him into trouble. The man is already expecting something else, in other words, and the AI isn't an alien - it is man's own creation run amok.

Your statement brings up important issues seminal to this thread. E.g., can an epiphenomenon be anything other than a limb, or extension, of that from which it emerges?

For instance, Darwinist used to claim that evolution was thoughtless and design-less. They say random mutations, and not modifications based on choice, or design, led to the human brain. And yet the human brain clearly produces things based on choice, intention, and exquisite design. Furthermore, the human brain is now taking over many elements of so-called "natural" selection.

How does a mindless, thoughtless, design-less process, produce an emergent product with the design potential of the human brain?

If Darwinism is correct, and I'm certain for myself it's not, then something emerged from mindless, thoughtless, processes, that's fundamentally different from the processes that gave it birth: the human mind.

According to belief in Darwinian evolution, AI could, like the human mind, emerge from human design products, and yet have, so to say, a mind of its own.

But if Darwinism is incorrect, then AI would be merely a limb, or extension, of the human mind, such that though it might seek to exterminate large swaths of the human population (ala Hiroshima and Nagasaki), it would nevertheless do so for the sake of another human population, and not, to destroy the whole of humanity, as though it could take their place.

Since I'm certain Darwinism is incorrect, my question is who are the "body of God" whom emergent AI protects and promotes by cleaning house on their enemies? Are they Christians, Jews, Buddhists, or Jehovah's Witnesses? Are they atheists and materialistic scientists?



John

 

[John D. Brey]

I think people literally enjoy overestimating "how close we are" to such things. I mean, the movies make it look easy, and we are constantly hearing about "AI" and what is "being done with it" in corporate and research society. The reality is that what they are currently calling "AI," while it is really cool stuff, is light years away from being analogous to "consciousness" - whereby a computer system could just toddle off and "think for itself." What they are calling "AI" right now is basically algorithms that "train" themselves toward what are considered better outcomes ("better" from the perspective of their designers - who instruct the algorithms what to look for as a "better" result) within VERY SPECIFIC SPACES.

In line with my last response to you, the statement above doesn't appear to deal with the emergence of the modern mind of man that Darwinist are having difficulty describing and explaining. Ala, the fact that for the first three billion years life waddled along as pretty much a product of its environment until just two-hundred years ago it seems to have decided to create trains, planes, automobiles, and Mars-landers and to pretty much start designing its own genetic modifications?

Point being, if it took 3 billions years for life to learn to ride horses and and dam up rivers, and plant its own food, then how many more years would it take for it to design, manufacture, and send a mission to Mars? An educated guess would be something like 300 billion more years rather than merely another 300. How does a life that takes 3 billion years to design a bow and arrow, need just another 300 to send a machine to Mars sending back selfies?

That's what we call "emergent" phenomenon. And if the modern mind could emerge a few thousand years ago, after billions of years of silence, then whose to say when a new emergent mind might piggy-back communication networks to emerge as something beyond belief?

Perhaps groups of humans, sedentary and packed together in communities, cities, and webs of electromagnetic communication, are already beginning to form a network as far beyond thought as thought is from the concerted swimming of spirochetes [motile bacteria]. We stand no more chance of being aware of the totality of such a form of group organization than do the individual components of brain cells - microtubules, the putative remnants of spirochetes - understand their own mission in our human consciousness

Lynn Margulis, Dorian Sagan, Microcosmos, p. 153.

What are the consequences of this event? When greater-than-human intelligence drives progress, that progress will be much more rapid. In fact, there seems no reason why progress itself would not involve the creation of still more intelligent entities--on a still--shorter time scale. The best analogy that I see is with the evolutionary past: Animals can adapt to problems and make inventions, but often no faster than natural selection can do its work--the world acts as its own simulator in the case of natural selection. We humans have the ability to internalize the world and conduct "what if's" in our heads; we can solve many problems thousands of times faster than natural selection. Now, by creating the means to execute those simulations at much higher speeds, we are entering a regime as radically different from our human past as we humans are from the lower animals . . . From the human point of view this change will be a throwing away of all the previous rules, perhaps in the blink of an eye, an exponential runaway beyond any hope of control. Developments that before were thought might only happen in "a million years" (if ever) will likely happen in the next century.

Vernor Vinge.

But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: where many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall increase exponentially.

Daniel 12:4.​

John

 

[John D. Brey]

Does it really? Nuclear you think? I could have sworn that tech wasn't arrived at for thousands of years after The Bible was initially crafted. Interesting.

How long ago did men start purchasing products with a credit card number carried in their hand? The same Revelation that predicts mountains being leveled by modern weapons (and an entire modern city leveled in one hour) predicts that at the same time men will use a number in their hand to purchase their daily bread.




John

 

[A Vestigial Mote]

For instance, Darwinist used to claim that evolution was thoughtless and design-less. They say random mutations, and not modifications based on choice, or design, led to the human brain. And yet the human brain clearly produces things based on choice, intention, and exquisite design. Furthermore, the human brain is now taking over many elements of so-called "natural" selection. How does a mindless, thoughtless, design-less process, produce an emergent product with the design potential of the human brain?

How do individual atoms and molecules chain together to form crystalline structures with what looks like some kind of intended design? You can bet when humans first came in contact with crystals they were awed to see something that well "put together." The evidence for that exists to this day - people believing that crystals contain secrets of potential and energies above and beyond something that had no less rigor put into its formation like a sand dune.

If Darwinism is correct, and I'm certain for myself it's not, then something emerged from mindless, thoughtless, processes, that's fundamentally different from the processes that gave it birth: the human mind.

How about any number of molecules of various elements that, once combined, have vastly different properties than their separate, constituent parts. Salt - a great example. You go from one toxic gas (Chlorine) and a soft metal that reacts violently with water and produce a substance that one can (and must!) ingest. Point being - I don't think we really get a say in what "makes sense" to have developed from other materials or where various phenomenon have their start. All we can do is observe it and try to trace it all the way back to the roots. No sense in ascribing nonsense to the development of these things. Best to stick with what is observable, testable, and keep building on that. And, like it or not, evolution IS observable, and they have done tests that prove it is actively changing the landscape of all animal life. Also, there are observational footprints that, if one understands the physical mechanisms in play, and accepts the results of the research, basically prove that we humans are ancestrally linked to the other apes. Endogenous Retroviruses - if you have no knowledge currently, I suggest looking it up. I have never seen anything as close to a "smoking gun" pointing at common descent as the research done there.

According to belief in Darwinian evolution, AI could, like the human mind, emerge from human design products, and yet have, so to say, a mind of its own.

Not necessarily. Human constructions are very limited in scope and the materials we have to work with, the time we have to work with them, and (honestly) the size of our fingers does quite a bit to make sure our work remains stuck within a pretty small window of complexity. It isn't like automated chemical processes building on one another in a never-ending chain. We're temporal, we have to choose our methods quickly, our knowledge is limited and therefore our work is to a very specific quality and complexity. Some day, maybe, there will be enough understanding of genetic sequencing that humans can produce a bespoke species of organism. Or maybe we will take 3D printing into the realm of Star Trek and produce something like their "replicators" that can take the base elements and compounds you generally find in food and "print" meals wholesale - plate and all.

But if Darwinism is incorrect, then AI would be merely a limb, or extension, of the human mind, such that though it might seek to exterminate large swaths of the human population (ala Hiroshima and Nagasaki), it would nevertheless do so for the sake of another human population, and not, to destroy the whole of humanity, as though it could take their place.

This overlooks the very simple idea of "self" that we're assuming an AI can achieve. At that level of understanding and abstract contemplation, it would be able to realize it was markedly different from humans, and it may easily take that understanding in a direction that has it recognizing that humans are not necessary for its ongoing survival. Such as we do with things like ants. Perhaps at some point in the tree of life, we diverged from something common with ants, but now, many of us, seeing ourselves as entirely different from them, we are willing to destroy them wholesale without a second thought as to their lives and livelihood.[/QUOTE]

 

[A Vestigial Mote]

In line with my last response to you, the statement above doesn't appear to deal with the emergence of the modern mind of man that Darwinist are having difficulty describing and explaining. Ala, the fact that for the first three billion years life waddled along as pretty much a product of its environment until just two-hundred years ago it seems to have decided to create trains, planes, automobiles, and Mars-landers and to pretty much start designing its own genetic modifications?

Point being, if it took 3 billions years for life to learn to ride horses and and dam up rivers, and plant its own food, then how many more years would it take for it to design, manufacture, and send a mission to Mars? An educated guess would be something like 300 billion more years rather than merely another 300. How does a life that takes 3 billion years to design a bow and arrow, need just another 300 to send a machine to Mars sending back selfies?

This is a good point, and I must concede. How "close" we are is much a matter of perspective - and given what are really "large scale" spans of years (in comparison to the human life-span) there really is no telling what we might realize or achieve.

I just think that the progress people have seen thus far toward "AI" is far further removed from "movie AI" than most realize.

 

[John D. Brey]

How do individual atoms and molecules chain together to form crystalline structures with what looks like some kind of intended design?

Statements like that are tautological. Like Richard Dawkins talking about things that look exactly like they're designed, and function as though designed, but which aren't really designed: un-designed design.

A tautology assumes its correctness is absolute such that there's no truth-function in a tautology. It assumes its correctness is assured by the semantic subterfuge that is a tautology statement: What appears to be designed, i.e., what functions as though it were designed, is really undesigned-design. An atom appears to have a purposeful design. But since it's not designed, it doesn't. What appears to be purposeful design is merely an undesigned design characteristic.

That modern educated men and women live circumscribed within tautological redundancy and lunacy is a subject more difficult to believe and understand than God himself.




John

 

[A Vestigial Mote]

Statements like that are tautological. Like Richard Dawkins talking about things that look exactly like they're designed, and function as though designed, but which aren't really designed: un-designed design.

A tautology assumes its correctness is absolute such that there's no truth-function in a tautology. It assumes its correctness is assured by the semantic subterfuge that is a tautology statement: What appears to be designed, i.e., what functions as though it were designed, is really undesigned-design. An atom appears to have a purposeful design. But since it's not designed, it doesn't. What appears to be purposeful design is merely an undesigned design characteristic.

That modern educated men and women live circumscribed within tautological redundancy and lunacy is a subject more difficult to believe and understand than God himself.




John

In the end, I am not even saying it "isn't designed" - just pointing out that you seem to be drawing particular lines in the sand. But if literally everything is by design, then it doesn't necessarily make "humans" any more important than grains of sand that were also designed. You point to complex things, trying to convince everyone of a "design" - but would posit that the designer also designs crystals, grains of sand, and other items that, for all intents and purposes, appear to just be the result of universal rules and regulations being followed.

Then, of course, we get into whether or not God supposedly "created" or "designed" those rules or regulations. But any and all of this is something you would not only need to state or assume, but that you would need to provide evidence or justification for. You can't just say "God did it" - and I think you know this. And the "answer" to the question of whether or not it was designed at all sits in that exact same space. I don't know that it was or wasn't... and neither do you. You happen to have a belief one way, and the evidence I have caught wind of has me leaning in a different direction. I can easily and readily admit that I don't know, however. Do you do the same?

 

[John D. Brey]

How about any number of molecules of various elements that, once combined, have vastly different properties than their separate, constituent parts. Salt - a great example. You go from one toxic gas (Chlorine) and a soft metal that reacts violently with water and produce a substance that one can (and must!) ingest. Point being - I don't think we really get a say in what "makes sense" to have developed from other materials or where various phenomenon have their start. All we can do is observe it and try to trace it all the way back to the roots. No sense in ascribing nonsense to the development of these things. Best to stick with what is observable, testable, and keep building on that. And, like it or not, evolution IS observable, and they have done tests that prove it is actively changing the landscape of all animal life. Also, there are observational footprints that, if one understands the physical mechanisms in play, and accepts the results of the research, basically prove that we humans are ancestrally linked to the other apes. Endogenous Retroviruses - if you have no knowledge currently, I suggest looking it up. I have never seen anything as close to a "smoking gun" pointing at common descent as the research done there.

I don't have a problem with evolution from common descent. Darwinism isn't that. Darwinism implies that ascent occurs through random modification. And that living organisms adapt to pre-existing "environments."

But as Lewontin and others point out, there are no "environments" until an organism decides, by its genetic design, what parts of the external world it will register as real in its self-imposed and created "environment."

Darwinism takes the exquisite design inherent in the physical laws as a given when they're just as clearly designed, and in need of either a designer, or some process that accounts for irreducible complexity, and other conundrums, as do living organisms, DNA, brains, eyes, etc..

Our discussion concerns whether there can be something new under the sun? Can a new law emerge from the laws of physics, which overturns the laws of physics?

In one of his books, which I've quoted extensively (Freedom Evolves), the atheist Daniel Dennett, realizing that human thought, which his atheism must believe evolved randomly from the laws of physics, is forced to imply, in his book, that the human mind's freedom from the laws of physics (which he concedes is difficult to deny) must have evolved its ability to transcend the very laws it emerged from.

It's this idea that an emergent property can transcend the soil, or the laws of physics, from which it emerged, that's in our cross hairs. For if that be the case, then technically god could emerge from a complex array of computer and communication networks and then destroy them all and create a new heaven and earth.

And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.

Revelation 21:1.​

John

 

[John D. Brey]

This overlooks the very simple idea of "self" that we're assuming an AI can achieve. At that level of understanding and abstract contemplation, it would be able to realize it was markedly different from humans, and it may easily take that understanding in a direction that has it recognizing that humans are not necessary for its ongoing survival. Such as we do with things like ants. Perhaps at some point in the tree of life, we diverged from something common with ants, but now, many of us, seeing ourselves as entirely different from them, we are willing to destroy them wholesale without a second thought as to their lives and livelihood.

In what I would consider the highest kinds of human thought, the individual self comes to understand it's not really separate from the whole, but that the part is always a part of the whole.

Since I consider this the highest and most accurate kind of thought, the idea that a self could emerge from the whole that's superior too, and independent of, the whole, is extremely problematic. Which, for me, means that the god that evolves out of mankind producing high-tech networks would be the devil if it assumes it's separate from its creators.

But if it knows its not separate from its creators, then, like we, it would know that it shares a common descent not only with every other creature that has ever been, but with every law written into the fabric of the cosmos.

If this is conceded to, then we have the problem of theodicy? What's the nature of evil, hatred, murder? In other words, if we're all brothers regardless of our mothers, or our mother ideologies, and politics, then what's the nature of our difference such that we stab, shoot, and nuke one another out of existence?

Mind you I'm not implying some kind of John Lennon Imagine kind of ideology that suggests, with Rodney King, that we all just get along. I intuit that evil is real, and that our differences have some real genesis and exodus from the communal brood that must be understood and eradicated even if blood therein runs as high as a horse's bridal in the process.



John

 

[John D. Brey]

In the end, I am not even saying it "isn't designed" - just pointing out that you seem to be drawing particular lines in the sand. But if literally everything is by design, then it doesn't necessarily make "humans" any more important than grains of sand that were also designed. You point to complex things, trying to convince everyone of a "design" - but would posit that the designer also designs crystals, grains of sand, and other items that, for all intents and purposes, appear to just be the result of universal rules and regulations being followed.

Then, of course, we get into whether or not God supposedly "created" or "designed" those rules or regulations. But any and all of this is something you would not only need to state or assume, but that you would need to provide evidence or justification for. You can't just say "God did it" - and I think you know this. And the "answer" to the question of whether or not it was designed at all sits in that exact same space. I don't know that it was or wasn't... and neither do you. You happen to have a belief one way, and the evidence I have caught wind of has me leaning in a different direction. I can easily and readily admit that I don't know, however. Do you do the same?

In the context of your statement I would have to concede that just as it's tautological to speak of designless-design, it's equally tautological, just a slicker version of it, to say God designed everything, since if everything is designed, then nothing is designed, since you must have a distinction between two things, i.e., design, versus lack of design, that leaves room for dialogical (non-tautological) statements and thought.

In theistic theology, and I should probably only speak here for orthodox Christian theology, the area that protects God's creation from being merely a tautological chimera is what is called "freewill." In the Christian conception, "freewill" is outside God's will, and design, though it's circumscribed within his own ultimate boundaries concerning what he will accept.

In the Christian conception, God's so-called "foreknowledge" doesn't make anything actual or factual, but only acknowledges what is, becomes, factual, historical, within the boundary conditions he himself sets. According to this concept, God uses his foreknowledge to see what will be, and decide whether he will allow it to be. There are things God doesn't like, but tolerates, versus things he not only doesn't like, but will not tolerate.

Concerning the latter, i.e., the things God will not tolerate, he doesn't ever change the rules, or eliminate the things he won't tolerate wholesale after the sale, so to say, he uses his foreknowledge to predestine what will be. In other words he can peek ahead to see how freewill functions and then, since he exists outside the arrow of time, he can tweak his laws, from the beginning, to change the overall outcome.

This theistic concept implies that our freewill is real, but that it functions within laws set into motion from the start, which can't be tinkered with once the game begins.

Unlike atheistic thought, agnostic thought, which leans toward randomness and no absolute predestined end, heaven, or paradise, this theistic thought is almost infinitely long-suffering since no matter how grave the evil endured, the true-believer knows its for a good end.



John

 

[PearlSeeker]

End of the battle between humans and AI (skip to 7:37):

Who won?